Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

by Jung Chang

On our way to the station, I had asked my father if I could go down the Yangtze during the summer vacation. ‘The priority in my life,’ I had declared, ‘is to have fun.’ He had shaken his head disapprovingly. ‘When you are young, you should make your priority study and work.’ I brought up the subject again in the waiting area. A cleaner was sweeping the ground. At one point her path was partly blocked by a northern peasant woman who was sitting on the cement floor with a tattered bundle next to her and two toddlers in rags. A third child was suckling her breast, which she had bared without a trace of shyness, and which was black with dirt. The cleaner swept the dust right over them, as though they were not there. The peasant woman did not move a muscle. My father turned to me and said, ‘With people living like this all around you, how can you possibly have fun?’ I was silent. I did not say, ‘But what can I, a mere individual, do? Must I live miserably for nothing?’ That would have sounded shockingly selfish. I had been brought up in the tradition of ‘regarding the interest of the whole nation as my own duty’ (yi tian-xia wei ji-ren). Now, in the emptiness I felt after my father’s death, I began to question all such precepts. I wanted no grand mission, no ‘causes’, just a life—a quiet, perhaps a frivolous life—of my own. I told my mother that when the summer vacation came I wanted to travel down the Yangtze.